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Comment by garrygosh | Hacker News Reader

Worst product I’ve ever used

That's a not a very helpful feedback, especially for folks that might be looking into using them. Any chance you can share more on what you don't like?

Not the original commenter, but for me, several things made me despise it:

* No way of entering code blocks renders the product completely useless for technical teams. (JIRA also makes it particularly complicated with their "code block" element)

* The clunkiness of the heavy-weight JavaScript frontend is inducing a very negative feeling the moment I think about having to open Asana.

* The user interface breaks commonly established UX patterns: Middle click on a card doesn't open the task in a new window, as all other clickable things in a browser suggest. Cross-referencing two tickets is completely impossible (besides cloning the tab and opening two separate tasks in both)

Also imposible to link pull requests to tasks and back (because Asana tasks has long unreadable urls), constantly changing urls mean that you can't put Asana task URL in the vcs commit message to make it easier understanding evolution of code.

No markdown support, you have to remember clumsy set of unique hot keys for message formatting.

I was a very unhappy user of Asana.

The feature I most wanted out of Asana, back when I had to use it, was a way to open links to individual issues as some kind of basic, plain HTML page so I'd rarely have to load Asana itself. I dreaded opening it every time, couldn't just leave it open because it ate too much memory and too many cycles for something I only needed to look at a few times a day.

Small note, but JIRA’s latest redesign did introduce easier code block support. Just hit three backticks in the editor and it switches to code entry.

Incredibly confusing UI. We found using something like Trello was simpler and cheaper.

The best way to describe Asana from a product perspective would be “just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it’s good”

We tried to move to Asana when Trello announced their restrictions a while back. At the time Asana had no production grade way to migrate from Trello. The tool they had was just an extension build by a third party and it did a poor job at migrating your boards over without losing detail.

For something so critical to Asana's business model - in capturing Trello evacuees - it sure felt a bit weird.

Has things improved since then?

In the end we went all the way to Azure DevOps to solve our problem. (But in doing so we created a million more!)

What did Azure DevOps do for you that Asana didn’t, and what are the problems it created? At what stage / situations would you recommend it?

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